Frogmarch

Although the average Northwesterner might be inclined to say that the land is visited with various Biblical plagues (tent caterpillars, espresso-bar chains, out-of-town relatives), a close reading of Exodus reveals that in fact there is only one discernable parallell between life in this region and the second chapter of The Good Book, which is the annual migration this time of year of tens of thousands of nickel-sized Pacific Tree Frogs from the ponds in which they hatched to the surrounding forests.

According to the Bible, the frogs of the Second Plague "will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs." Lacking both a palace and a kneading trough I cannot personally speak to abundance of frogs in those specific locations, but as a government official and a person (I contend it is possible to be both) I can attest to having froglets hop into my hair while I am picking dahlias on a rainy afternoon. Likewise, the tiny creatures are regularly seen bounding erratically across the living room, deftly defying our efforts to capture them by zigzagging with an unpredictability that would be the envy of an NFL running back. My oven has so far remained frog-free, but during most of the month of September we constantly find the froglets sticking to the siding, the greenhouse and the car, and tucked into the petals of nearly every flower in the garden. On wet nights we see hundreds of them hopping across the road, looking like exceptionally large raindrops.

Eventually the frogs settle into the salal and sword fern forest understory, where they spend the winter fattening up on gnats, emitting an occasional chirp and generally lounging around waiting for spring.

Deschutes Deliverance, Part III

 

So it all came down to this:  We were going to be eaten by coyotes, frozen, poisoned by spiders or killed by porta-potty stench.  We were alone in the wilderness.  I could hear my ancestors whispering to each other in pioneer heaven:  “She’s from your side of the family! My roommate sat on a rock, her sobs masked by the rushing water of the river invisible in the darkness.

Then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of the kind of righteous anger that only a pampered suburban princess in danger of not getting her way can experience passed over me.  Channeling my inner Scarlett O’Hara for the equivalent of pulling down the drapes in Tara to make a dress, I rummaged the bottom of my filthy daypack for my one remaining soggy Kleenex.  Wiping off my face and shoes I marched back to the fishing camp.  Marlboro Man was now sitting in his battered pickup, listening to the radio.  Something about the determined look on my face must have impressed him, for he rolled down the window as trudged up.  “You have to have to help us!” I demanded.  MM looked at this new, enhanced version of me with a different expression.  “So your group really hasn’t come back for you?”  “No,” I said.  “And they’re not going to.  If you don’t take us to Maupin and something happens to us, it will be your fault” I declared like the lawyer I didn’t then know I was destined to become. “All right,” said Marlboro Man, grinding out his cigarette in the pickup’s ashtray,  “Get in.”  Desperately concealing my tears of joy at my new-found powers of persuasion, I shouted for my roommate to join us. 

The ride to Maupin was surprisingly uneventful.  Clouds of ghostly late-summer moths danced in the bouncing cone of the pickup’s headlights while ground squirrels darted across the washboarded road.  A conversationless twenty minutes after leaving Shearer’s Falls, our savior dumped us unceremoniously in the financial district of a town that can best be described as a badly-imagined Hollywood Wild West movie set. 

Across the street was a bar dim with burned-out lightbulbs and loud with jukebox country music.  We peeked timidly in through the ripped screen door to see a tableau vivant of buxom, leathery-skinned women of a certain age, rawboned older men in threadbare chambray shirts with bolo ties, and a scowling bartender.  Half expecting to jukebox soundtrack to switch to Ennio Morricone’s whistling theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” I shuffled up to the bar and asked if I could use the telephone.  In an eerie repeat of the afternoon’s experiences with Marlboro Man, he said “No, and get out of here.  You’re underage.”  I was sure what he really meant was “You’re a snot-nosed suburbanite college kid like all the others who parade through here every summer with your fancy gear and your shirts with the little man riding a horse embroidered on them.  Well, little missy, we ride real horses around here and don’t need no fancy-pants sissies from Seattle and Portland telling us what to do.  Now scram while I go shoot some spotted owls.” Anyway, since I actually was underage and was sick of arguing with people at this point, we left.

It was now getting cold.  Across the street stood a phone booth, its halo of hospital-bluish-white fluorescent light an oddly uninviting beacon in the surrounding blackness.  Between us my roommate and I determined that we had 35 cents, enough for one phone call, like condemned prisoners.  We squoze into the booth, shutting the door behind us against the growing cold, nervously pushed  the coins into the slot and dialed.  The operator answered, sounding nearly as cranky as the bartender.  I explained our situation.  “That’s not a real emergency,” [historical note – this was before 911 existed]she responded.  “Call back later if no one comes to pick you up.  In despair, begged for a number for the Sheriff’s Department.  The operator relented and started reading it to me, when I suddenly realized I didn’t have a pen.  Just as all hope appeared to be lost, my roommate pulled a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich out of her bag.  Leaning up against the phone booth’s glass door, she wrote the number in peanut butter on the back of the lunch bag.

As fate would have it, at that moment I spotted a Wasco County Sheriff’s car trolling slowly by. I dropped the phone and burst out of the phone booth, skittered briefly on the loose gravel and took off in a burst of speed that would have made Florence Griffith-Joyner proud.  Seeing an apparently insane person running behind their squad car, and lacking Marlboro Man’s freedom to ignore us, the officers stopped.  As I ran up, the officer on the passenger side actually rolled up the window and pulled his shotgun forward, not pointing it at me but making sure I could see it.  ‘This is absurd,’ I thought.  ‘They’re afraid of a 100-pound unarmed coed?'  I pounded on the window, and Officer Friendly lowered it a crack.  “What do you want?”  By this time my roommate, who had started crying again because she hadn’t seen the squad car at first and thought I had finally snapped and gone insane, came up to join us.  I explained our situation.  As usual, my sublime persuasive powers yielded utter disbelief, until I got to the part about the plan to take the injured girl to the hospital in The Dalles.  The officer radioed the hospital, and lo, a miracle occurred.  The hospital confirmed that yes, a group of rafters had been there late that afternoon, and had discovered that two of their members were missing.  The officers softened immediately.  “Come with us,” they said.  “It’s a long way to The Dalles [about 50 miles]” so we’ll get you something to eat and drink and then we’ll take you there.  They called the owner of a nearby coffee shop, who came down in her bathrobe from her apartment above the store, unlocked the door and seated us in a dark booth and gave us powdered donuts and glasses of orange soda.  We were regaling the officers with our adventures when I spotted headlights coming down the gravel road.  It was one of our vans.  For the second time in the evening I sprang up and sprinted out into the street, waving frantically.  The van screeched to a halt, and our friends came tumbling out.  “We thought you were in the other van!”  “We didn’t realize you were gone until we got to The Dalles!” “We drove all the way back shining a flashlight on the side of the road looking for you!”  Thanking the officers, we clambered into the van and headed east back toward the college, into the faintest suggestion of dawn.

Deschutes Deliverance, Part II

My roommate grew up on a farm in rural Washington with six older brothers whose hobbies ranged from plumbing to bartending to backyard Camaro repair.  As she was a shy, scholarly type, her parents and brothers had taken great pains to shield her from the more unsavory bits of farm life, which meant she was well qualified for college but as prepared for abandonment in the wilderness as I was, which is to say not at all.

Our first reaction to the vanished vans was based on careful consideration of the situation and coolheaded assessment of our options:  We screamed.  After getting that step out of the way we cycled through several Kubler-Rossian stages of panic:

• Running up and down the gravel road to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us by parking just around the bend (they weren’t).
• Walking cautiously back toward the outskirts of the fishing camp to see if Marlborough Man or any of his friends were around (they weren’t).
• Running back up the road to check again to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us (they still weren’t).

Finally, the panic exhausted out of my system like a purple-faced toddler inhaling noisily when it’s evident that mother is not going to cough up a cookie.  It was time to take stock and actually come up with a plan. What would my study pioneer ancestors have done?  After all, they had mined gold in Colorado in the 1880s and in Alaska in the 1900s, opened a dry-goods store Vancouver, BC when it was nothing but a tiny railhead in the wilderness, and helped build the giant Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana during the Great Depression.  I suddenly felt a weight of responsibility not to be an embarrassment.  However, as we rummaged through our meager belongings, it occurred to me that my ancestors had probably never found themselves in the bottom of a sagebrush canyon wearing t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, equipped only with half a peanut butter sandwich, an empty bottle of bug spray and a lipstick.  I suppose if they had, they would have figured out a way to fashion these items into a signal flare or a some such thing, but I was evidently sitting in the back of the class leafing through Vogue when those lessons were being taught.

At any rate, we decided to buck up and get ourselves out of this situation. Our first idea was to try to spend the night where we were.  I dimly recalled from third-grade Bluebirds camp that one was not supposed to wander about when lost in the wilderness as searchers would look first where one was last seen.  But the light was disappearing fast, and we had nothing resembling a shelter available to us.  My roommate suggested spending the night in the porta-potties, but then nixed the idea when a careful assessment of the floor plan revealed that the only way to do so was to cuddle up in a fetal position around the toilet itself, an arrangement unknown even in most Times Square hotels.  I then hit upon the bright idea of spending the night in a large culvert across the road from the potties, but the ominous dribble of foul-smelling water in the bottom of the giant drainage pipe did not bode well.  And there might be spiders.

Our second idea was to hike out on the gravel road to the nearest town, about eight miles away.  This plan went like clockwork for about a quarter of a mile, until we realized we were alone in a vast, empty landscape of lava boulders, tumbleweeds and dust, lit only by an immense black sky thick with stars.  Were those footsteps behind us?  Shhh!!!  What was that rustling by the side of the road?  Trying not to run so fast that we would trip and fall on the washboard road, we beat a hasty retreat back to our starting point.

When we arrived, out of breath, we saw twinkling propane lantern lights at the fishing camp.  Marlboro Man and a few others were drinking beer, filleting the day’s steelhead catch, and poking up the coals in the campfire rings. 

Emboldened by the adrenaline-fueled rush back to the campsite, I grabbed my roommate by the elbow and frog-marched her with me toward the nearest fisherman.  “Look pathetic” I advised her unnecessarily.  Smoothing the grit out of my hair as best I could, I shambled up to Marlboro Man, who barely looked up from cooler in which he was arranging a layer of bloody filets.  “Umm, we were left behind on a rafting trip today…” I croaked.  Marlboro Man’s cigarette shifted slightly in his mouth.  “Umm, could you possibly give us a ride to Maupin so we could call someone?”  Marlboro Man studied us carefully through a nimbus of blue-ish smoke, taking careful note of our bedraggled clothes, meager possessions and the goosebumps that were starting to appear on our bare arms and legs as the evening deepened into night.

“No,” he said, and turned back to the filets.

To be continued…